What To Do When Employees Resent Coworkers Who Work From Home

Maritza manages a team of fifteen, five of which work from home. Recently, she’s noticed some of her in-office team showing signs of unhappiness and disengagement. Terry, an employee of eight years, has stopped contributing to group discussions almost entirely. Jamal and Doug have started leaving the office together a little earlier than the official end of the workday. Ravi steps out for calls constantly, and takes extended lunches—that coupled with his nicer-than-usual attire makes her think he’s looking for work elsewhere. She’s even heard Fatima loudly say negative things about the company to her coworker.

Maritza tries to be good to her employees. She makes sure the office is stocked with healthy snacks, never emails anyone outside of work hours, promotes work-life balance, and has recently fought to include gym memberships as part of the benefit package. She even organizes quarterly volunteer opportunities for the team. What was she doing wrong?

What’s Going on Here?

When out with a colleague, Maritza mentioned what she’s noticed about her team and how she’s been trying to address it. Her colleague knew exactly what was going on. He had been working with her team on a project for the last two months and heard all about it!

It turns out several members of her team resent the fact that others work from home. The resentment started with a few people, and slowly spread until it’s now apparent in team performance. This is a problem popping up more and more in organizations around the country as the movement toward remote work increases speed. Gallup reports that 37% of workers say they have telecommuted, up from just 9% in 1995.

But What’s REALLY Going on Here?

If you take that resentment at face value as a manager, the only solution is allowing more people to work from home. However, that’s not always possible. So to manage the situation effectively and get employees back on track, you must look deeper into the situation. What is at the core of this resentment?

When it comes to the resentment about remote workers, there are a few things at play. Beyond simply wanting to skip their commute and work in pajamas, employees likely don’t trust that managers have their best interest in mind. They also see working from home as a privilege, and not being allowed to do so makes them feel that their manager doesn’t appreciate, value or trust them. This feeling is especially magnified in employees who have been loyal to the organization for many years. As a manager, what can you do to handle this situation?

What to do When Your In-Office Employees Resent Coworkers Who Work From Home

1. Start With an Open and Honest Conversation

While it may be uncomfortable at first, it’s important to have an open and honest conversation with employees showing signs of resentment. This will not only give you insight into what is really going on, but it will also help build your relationship. Start by taking a coaching approach and ask short (six words or less), open-ended questions that are advice free. Why?

• Keep questions short so that you don’t complicate the issue and derail the conversation. As a rule of thumb, make questions six words or less!
• Make questions open-ended in order to start a dialogue. These are questions that start with “what” or “how” and do not lead to a yes or no answer. In Maritza’s case, she may ask, “What do you really want?” or “What’s the underlying issue?”
• Finally, some people don’t want advice. When you keep your questions advice free, you keep the dialogue open and collaborative.

Once you get the conversation going, keep these eight quick tips for interpersonal communication and relationship building in mind. Look them over before you have the conversation to keep you focused on relationship building.

2. Work on Building Trust

Employees need to trust that their managers have their best interest in mind. If Maritza’s employees felt she was looking out for them, they may be more willing to accept the fact that some people work from home and others do not. Further, if they trusted Maritza, they’d have already spoken to her about their problem with the situation.

David DeSteno, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and author of The Truth About Trust, says trust is an “evolving thing that ebbs and flows.” It’s important for all managers to actively work on building trust with their teams, regardless of any issues of resentment. Here are five quick tips to help managers reinforce their trustworthiness:

1. Get to know your employees and let them get to know you. Express interest in your employees. Do you know where they grew up, or what their hobbies are? Look for things you have in common. This can happen casually, or at brown-bag lunches. You want your employees to know you’re in this together.
2. Be transparent and tell the truth. Share what is going on with the organization as a whole with your employees. This includes the current status and future goals. Consider distributing information like notes from board meetings or performance metrics to employees. Don’t forget to share bad news too—if you don’t tell people the difficult stuff, they are less likely to trust you.
3. Don’t play favorites. This one is a no-brainer, but sometimes managers don’t realize they are favoring certain employees over others. If you treat certain people to lunch, give particular employees assignments first, or share information with only a few on your team, your effort to build trust is completely undermined.
4. Trust your employees. Trust is a two-way street. If your employees don’t think you trust them, they aren’t going to trust you. Show your team you trust them by delegating tasks and giving them autonomy. Don’t tell them what to do, motivate them to meet their (clearly set) goals and let them decide how to achieve them.
5. Be competent and accountable. In order to believe in your management decisions, employees need to know you are competent. Show them this by being accountable, taking the blame when you make mistakes, and by always working to develop your skills. Don’t play the expert card—instead, have the humility to ask questions and show an eagerness to learn.

3. Develop a Plan to Show Appreciation

Employees who are resentful that others work from home often feel they are not appreciated, because if you appreciated them, you’d give them the option to work remotely too, right? The problem with that logic is that it is based on the fallacy that working from home is a privilege, when often it’s due to the type of position, or necessity. Get around this by actively and consistently showing appreciation. Here are some easy ways to show appreciation:

• Say thank you. When thanking, it’s more impactful if you are specific. Instead of saying, “Thanks for all of your hard work,” you might say, “Thank you for staying late and keeping on top of this project. We couldn’t have done it without your organization skills.”
• Give personalized gifts.
• Provide lunch or breakfast for staff. You can do this to celebrate an accomplishment, or for no reason at all.
• Give praise and feedback. Just like when saying thank you, being specific in your praise is more meaningful. Rather than, “You did a good job,” you could say something like, “Your attention to detail is amazing and your work really shows that.”
• Give money. This isn’t always possible, but gift cards and holiday bonuses go a long way in making employees feel appreciated.

For more ideas, check out these creative ways to show appreciation.

4. Facilitate a Discussion Between Remote and In-Office Workers

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. What many in-office employees don’t realize is that working from home has its own challenges. To start, remote workers can feel isolated and miss the causal socializing that happens in an office. Job security may feel precarious if they are left out of the loop, or miss too many impromptu meetings. They also miss out on any free lunches or special office activities. And they don’t have an IT person to handle broken printers, Internet outages, and poor phone connections. There isn’t a facilities manager that comes to their home to empty the garbage, vacuum and dust their desks either.

Facilitate a discussion between remote workers and in-office workers to let each air their personal challenges at work. It can be town hall style or even a brown-bag lunch. This will dispel the assumptions that each hold about the other.

5. Actively Invest in Your Employees’ Careers

Do you know what your employees’ greatest assets are? Are you using them to their full potential? Do you know how they’d like their career to develop? You should. Sit down with your employees and find out how they see themselves in the future of your organization. If working remotely is one of their career goals, work with them to develop a career plan that leads to a role that can be done from home. Added bonus: Having a goal to work toward will vastly improve engagement.

Ask Yourself the Big Question: Why Are Only Some Employees Permitted to Work From Home?

Studies have shown that employees who work from home are not only happier and less likely to quit, but they are more productive. Have you stopped to reevaluate why some employees work remotely while others have to come in to the office? Remote working is a relatively new reality in organizations. Many have not adopted the option, even if it would cut down costs and improve productivity. Take time to evaluate why certain roles are done from home, and if those roles are being done well. It’s possible that you’ve overlooked other positions that would be fine as remote jobs, even for just part of the time. Consider developing clear criteria for remote work—is it only for certain positions? Do you have to be at the company for a certain amount of time? Can this be an option for employees with medical issues? If there is a clear criteria in place, and your employees know that criteria, resentment will not fester due to assumptions.

We are seeing many big changes in the workforce and there are more to come. Remote work is a major workforce trend that is here to stay. Start planning now to successfully manage teams that are mixed with in-office and remote workers, and you will avoid many potential problems that will negatively affect organizational culture and even the bottom line.

Would you rather work an the office or from home? I’d love to hear your reasoning. Tell me on Twitter, leave a comment below, or send me an email.